Fantastic Architecture: Vostell, Fluxus, and the Built Environment

Taking its title and inspiration from the seminal publication Fantastic Architecture (1969), edited by Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins and published by Something Else Press, this exhibition presents various approaches to architecture, urban space, and the built environment within an expanded international community of Fluxus and related artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fantastic Architecture is presented in conjunction with the re-­siting, following a major conservation treatment, of Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic (1970), a monumental event-­sculpture in the University of Chicago’s Campus Art Collection. The exhibition contextualizes Concrete Traffic in relation to Vostell’s other related works from the period, including photomontage proposals for alterations to architectural and urban spaces and event scores for happenings intended for specific cities, as well as the work of his artistic peers and interlocutors. In Europe and the United States alike, the postwar period saw massive transformations of the urban landscape, the construction and expansion of freeway systems, and the rise of automobile culture, and artists of the time responded to these developments in a variety of ways. Like its eponymous exemplar, the exhibition embraces the porousness and intellectual foment of the experimental art world of the time, a context in which forms and concepts circulated among an international community of artists whose political and aesthetic projects did not always strictly align. Also included are works and projects by Fluxus impresario George Maciunas, Japanese collective Hi Red Center, happenings inventor Allan Kaprow, conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, and artist and poet Rosemary Mayer, and others.

Curator: Jacob Proctor, Curator, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

Presented by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, with additional support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts.